Robert C. Tucker

During the Gorbachev years, a reformist official ideology clashed with a conservative operational ideology, and this conflict fractured the party. In 1987, Tucker affirmed: '"Marxism-Leninism' is not at present a rigidly defined set of dogma that allows no scope for differences of interpretation on matters of importance, as it was earlier on. Gorbachev is propounding his own version of it while recognizing—and deploring—that far from all his party comrades share it". Indeed, freer expression of aspirations and grievances destabilized as well as de-Stalinized state-society relations and disintegrated as well as democratized the Soviet polity and society.

Tucker corroborated this hypothesis with evidence from the Soviet Union. In 1987, he affirmed: "The pattern of thinking one thing in private and being conformist in public will not vanish or radically change simply because glasnost has come into currency as a watchword of policy. Changing the pattern will take time and effort and, above all, some risk-taking openness in action by citizens who speak up ... [and] forsake the pattern of pretence which for so long has governed public life in their country." In 1993, he elaborated: "Although communism as a belief system ... is dying out [in post-Soviet Russia], very many of the real culture patterns of the Soviet period, including that very "'bureaucratism' that made a comeback after the revolutionary break in 1917, are still tenaciously holding on." And, in 1995, he added: "The banning of the CPSU, the elimination of communism as a state creed, and the breakup of the USSR as an imperial formation marked in a deep sense the ending of the Soviet era. But in part because of the abruptness with which these events came about, much of the statist Soviet system and political culture survived into the 1990s."

Tucker compared Soviet and tsarist Russian political leaders, as well as various types of political leadership in various contexts. In Politics as Leadership (1981), he argued that leadership is "the essence of politics". He analyzed the diagnostic, prescriptive, and mobilizing functions of leadership. He surveyed "the process of political leadership," "leadership through social movements," and "leadership and the human situation". He underscored that a leader's definition of a situation could be self-fulfilling and must be communicated effectively to different audiences. And he elaborated on the key sociopsychological maxim that "situations defined as real are real in their consequences":

Tucker's interest in political leadership was by no means confined to Stalin. Indeed, he addressed the subject of political leadership in a much broader context in his 1981 book Politics as Leadership, in which he viewed politics as leadership rather than as power. Such an approach, Tucker argued, was more useful to students of society, since it was more comprehensive and could open up more areas to political analysis than could the more orthodox view of politics as power. In his preface to the 1995 revised edition of the book, Tucker restated two fundamental propositions that had guided his inquiries into political leadership: (1) "political leadership often makes a crucial difference in the lives of states and other human communities"; and (2) "leadership—although the term itself has a positive resonance—can be a malignant force in human affairs as well as a force for good." His collected works clearly demonstrated the veracity of both propositions.

Gorbachev made glasnost, perestroika, and democratization the centerpieces of a revolutionary ideology, which sparked a divisive public debate about the political content and policy implications of these concepts. More revolutionary, in the late 1980s, Gorbachev discarded the "Brezhnev doctrine", withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan and allowing East European countries in the Soviet bloc to choose their own types of political system. And, most revolutionary, from late 1990 to late 1991, Gorbachev unintentionally and Boris Yeltsin intentionally spurred the disintegration of the Soviet Union, enabling the fifteen union republics to develop their own types of nation-state. Gorbachev at the time was the indirectly elected president of the Soviet Union, and Yeltsin was the directly elected president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, by far the largest and most important union republic. The rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin unequivocally confirmed Tucker's contention that the personalities and mentalities of top Soviet leaders could clash viscerally and vindictively. Tucker had long insisted that intraparty conflict was a catalyst of change in both Soviet policymaking procedures and substantive policies. He observed in 1957: "Probably the most important single failing of Soviet studies in the West has been a general tendency to take pretty much at face value the Communist pretension to a 'monolithic' system of politics. ... Not monolithic unity but the fiction of it prevails in Soviet politics. The ruling party has rarely if ever been the disciplined phalanx pictured by its image-makers, and Lenin's well-known Resolution on Party Unity of 1921 has largely been honored in the breach".

The intellectual tone for much of the work of the Planning Group under Tucker's leadership was set by his paper "Culture, Political Culture, and Soviet Studies," written for a 1971 conference on Communist Political Culture convened at Arden House in Harriman, New York. Subsequently, published in Political Science Quarterly (1973) and as the opening chapter in his book Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia (1987), that paper set forth the hypothesis that "if Communism in practice tends to be an amalgam of an innovated cultural system [Marxism] and elements of a national cultural ethos, then divergences of national cultural ethos will be one of the factors making for developmental diversity and cultural tension between different [Marxist] movements". Subsequent conferences of the Planning Group explored the extent of those divergences and developmental diversities, including a third element in the amalgam that Tucker had overlooked—components of imported foreign culture, including technology—but to which he was quite receptive.

What younger generations of comparativists in political science may not know is that Tucker was at the forefront of efforts to bring the comparative study of communist systems into the discipline of political science and the field of comparative politics. In 1969, he assumed chairmanship of the Planning Group on Comparative Communist Studies sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. During his six-year tenure as chair, the Planning Group convened a number of international conferences that shed new light on the similarities and differences among communist regimes. The proceedings of these conferences were reported to the profession through the publication of several conference volumes. Tucker's tenure as chair also saw the expansion of the Planning Group's Newsletter on Comparative Studies of Communism, which presented shorter discussion pieces on the subject of its masthead.

As Tucker detailed in The Soviet Political Mind (1963 and 1971, rev. ed.) and Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia (1987), Stalin's successors did not consensually craft a post-Stalinist political system. An oligarchic system emerged as the byproduct of struggle over power and policy among reformist and conservative party and state leaders, whose factions and coalitions increasingly sought the support of subnational party and state officials. Forswearing the use of violence to resolve intraparty disputes and outmaneuvering rivals in bureaucratic infighting, Khrushchev revitalized the party and reasserted its leading role vis-à-vis the state bureaucracies. But his international and domestic "hare-brained schemes"—above all, the Cuban Missile Crisis—led to his ouster by Brezhnev's "collective leadership", whose costly and prolonged military buildup helped to produce (in Tucker's apt words) "a swollen state" and "a spent society".

Tucker's Harvard University doctoral dissertation was in philosophy and challenged the dominant interpretations of Soviet and Western theorists. He linked the ideas of the young and mature Karl Marx and emphasized their "moralist," "ethical," and "religious" rather than political, economic, and social "essence". His revised dissertation was published as Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (1961) and was followed by a collection of innovative essays on Marxian theories of revolution, modernization, and distributive justice as well as comprehensive anthologies of the writings of Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin.

Although perhaps best known for his seminal trilogy on Stalin (the third volume of which remained unfinished at the time of his death), the corpus of Tucker's scholarly work was significant, among other reasons, for moving communism studies and particularly Soviet studies away from narrow area studies and helping to place them within the parameters of political science and the social sciences. His desire to move Soviet studies in that direction can be found in one of his earliest works—on the first page of an article entitled "Towards a Comparative Politics of Movement Regimes," published in The American Political Science Review (1961). This article was reprinted in an important collection of Tucker's early essays—The Soviet Political Mind (1963; rev. ed. 1971) — that included such important essays as "The Image of Dual Russia" — a classic piece that is still assigned in graduate and undergraduate courses on Soviet and Russian politics.

When Stalin died in 1953, Tucker experienced "intense elation" for personal and political reasons. His wife, Evgenia Pestretsova, was soon granted a visa to the United States (and his mother-in-law joined them a half-decade later after a face-to-face request to Khrushchev). Tucker saw a gradually, albeit fitfully, liberalizing Soviet polity, economy, and society and an improving Soviet-American relations (with prospects for much less conflict and much more cooperation).

Tucker's highly regarded work on Stalin drew on the theories of psychologist Karen Horney, providing insights into the feared (and still revered by some in Russia) Soviet leader and demonstrating the significance of psychological theories for understanding political leadership. Rather than merely describing Stalin's cruelty, paranoia, and mental quirks, Tucker was more concerned with explaining Stalin's psychological make-up. And that is where Horney's theories proved invaluable to him. He found in Horney's work the study of "neurotic character structure," which included such attributes as the "search for glory" and a "need for vindictive triumph". It was Horney's 1950 book Neurosis and Human Growth that particularly inspired him while serving on the staff of the American Embassy in Moscow at the time. A half century later, he was quite candid in acknowledging the role of that work in the development of his own thinking: "Instead of dealing in such abstract categories from a book of psychology, I was now using that book as guidance in a biographer's effort to portray his subject as an individual".

Tucker was a scholar of Russia and politics. His viewpoints were shaped by nine years (1944–1953) of diplomatic and translation work in wartime and postwar Russia (including persistent efforts to bring his Russian wife to the United States), by wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests in the social sciences and humanities (notably history, psychology, and philosophy), and by creative initiatives to benefit from and contribute to comparative political studies (especially theories of political culture and leadership).

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he was a Sovietologist at Princeton University. He graduated from Harvard College, earning an A.B. magna cum laude in 1939, followed by an A.M. in 1941. He served as an attaché at the American Embassy in Moscow from 1944–1953. He received his PhD degree from Harvard University in 1958; his doctoral dissertation was later revised and published as a book. His biographies of Joseph Stalin are cited by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies as his greatest contribution. At Princeton he started the Russian Studies Program and held the position of Professor of Politics Emeritus and IBM Professor of International Studies Emeritus until he died.

Tucker rejected the view that Stalinism was an "unavoidable," "ineluctable," or "necessary" product of Leninism. He highlighted the similarities between tsarist and Stalinist nationalism and patrimonialism, as well as the warlike brutality of the "Revolution from Above" in the 1930s. The chief causes of this revolution were Stalin's voracious appetite for personal, political, and national power and his relentless quest for personal, political, and national security. The chief consequences were the consolidation of Stalin's personal dictatorship, the creation of a military-industrial complex, and the collectivization and urbanization of the peasantry. And the chief means of achieving these ends included blood purges of party and state elites, centralized economic management and slave labor camps, and genocidal famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Robert Charles Tucker (May 29, 1918 – July 29, 2010) was an American political scientist and historian. Tucker is best remembered as a biographer of Joseph Stalin and as an analyst of the Soviet political system, which he saw as dynamic rather than unchanging.

Tucker presented lucidly formulated views on tsarist and Soviet politics. He affirmed that change in Soviet political leadership was even more important than continuity in Russian political culture. He contended that psychological differences were more important than ideological similarities in Soviet leadership politics and that Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev had very different personalities and mentalities. He emphasized that the different psychological make-ups of Russia's top political leaders invariably produced different perceptions of situations and options, which, in turn, periodically altered policymaking and implementation procedures as well as domestic and foreign policies. He argued that systemic changes came not only in October 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power, and in December 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, but also in the mid-1930s, when Lenin's one-party dictatorship was transformed into Stalin's one-man dictatorship, and in the mid-1950s, when oligarchic one-party rule filled the power vacuum created by the dictator's death. He underscored that Soviet and post-Soviet Russia's political development progressed in distinctive stages, which were the products of leading officials' choices among viable options at key junctures. Tucker's main stages were: War Communism (1917–1921), New Economic Policy (1921–1928), Revolution from Above (1928–1937), Neo-Tsarist Autocracy (1937–1953), Thaw (1953–1964), Stagnation (1964–1985), and Perestroika (1985–1991).